Obama’s Strategic Shift to Asia Is Hobbled by Pressure at Home and Crises Abroad

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On the Minute, the Times White House correspondent Mark Landler on the coming trip of President Obama to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.Published OnApril 22, 2014CreditImage by Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to announce an agreement with the Philippines next Monday that would give American ships and planes the most extensive access to bases there since the United States relinquished its vast naval installation at Subic Bay in 1992.

The deal, which will be the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s long-postponed trip to Asia that starts on Tuesday, is a modest step to reassert America’s military presence in Asia. But it could nonetheless antagonize China, which has stepped up its claims in both the South and East China Seas and is enmeshed in a standoff with the Philippines over a disputed clump of rocks known as Scarborough Shoal.

For Mr. Obama, it is the latest example of the deepening complexities of his efforts to shore up the strategic shift to Asia he announced three years ago and has struggled to maintain because of political pressures at home and a cascade of crises elsewhere in the world.

At a moment when Asia appears more rattled by China’s behavior than it has in decades, America’s fractious allies question its repeated assurances that the United States will be there for them. But the more Mr. Obama repeats his commitments, the more he plays into China’s narrative that his real motive is to contain its rise.

The premise of Mr. Obama’s strategy — that American power must follow its economic interests in a region where a growing middle class yearns for everything from iPhones to the new Ford Mustang — still makes sense, his advisers say. But they acknowledge that it faces acute challenges, which will demand a delicate balancing act.

“The countries in the region want the United States to be present and to be a stabilizing force, but they also don’t want tension between the United States and China, certainly not at a high pitch,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Obama’s second-term focus on Iran, Syria and the Middle East peace process has left Asian officials to wonder whether Washington is really committed to a larger footprint in the region. “If there’s real rebalancing, it is hard to find,” a Japanese official said recently.

Further complicating Mr. Obama’s challenge, Japan and South Korea, the economic engines that anchor America’s Pacific alliance, are barely talking to each other, as they rehash 70-year-old grievances. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are more active and arguably more successful than ever.

The president will have to address all these issues in the next week, including the sensitivities in the Philippines to a renewed American military presence. Much like the 2011 agreement to deploy Marines to Darwin, Australia, such a presence would theoretically give America more capacity to help its allies in territorial disputes with the Chinese.

There is little mystery to how the Chinese will most likely respond to such an agreement. On a visit to Beijing this month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel listened as the Chinese defense minister, Gen. Chang Wanquan, said China would “make no compromise, no concession, no treaty” in disputes with Japan. “The Chinese military can assemble as soon as summoned, fight any battle and win,” the general added.

Much of that is most likely bluster; the Chinese have shown no desire for direct confrontation. But administration officials and some outside experts say the Chinese may be calculating that the United States does not have the wherewithal to change its focus, particularly as it wrestles with new threats in Eastern Europe.

“If the U.S.-Russia relationship goes downhill, the Chinese will get a much easier ride,” said Minxin Pei, a prominent China scholar at Claremont McKenna College. “The U.S. cannot afford to be tough on both Russia and China at the same time.”

Mr. Obama came to office with a different approach to China, signaling that he recognized it should have a bigger voice in world affairs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state in the president’s first term, played down human rights on her first visit to Beijing, while David Miliband, the British foreign secretary at the time, warned that Europe risked becoming “spectators in a G2 world shaped by the U.S. and China.”

It did not last: Old divisions over North Korea, Mr. Obama’s willingness to host the Dalai Lama of Tibet and to sell arms to Taiwan, Chinese cyberattacks on American targets, and friction over intellectual property rights and other trade disputes put the relationship into a freeze.

Mr. Obama told aides that he “needed leverage” to counter China, one adviser recalled recently. By 2011, the administration began talking publicly about its new focus on Asia, suggesting, in a line of argument that can be traced back to the presidency of the older George Bush, that Asia was the place where creative foreign policy and a jobs agenda could meet.

Mr. Obama insisted that his concept of “rebalancing” would mean a greater diplomatic focus on Asia, a larger naval presence and deeper trade relationships. But as one senior official said, “Time and again, the urgent overwhelmed the important.”

So far, the larger diplomatic presence has not materialized. Mr. Obama has been forced to cancel two trips to the region because of battles with Congress. (This week’s visit will make up for one postponed in October.) Over time, that has exacted a cost.

“In Asia it’s not just quality time, it’s quantity time,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asia. “The president has been pulled in too many different directions, and I don’t think he’s developed the relationships that would show a qualitatively different U.S. approach to the region.”

Stephen W. Bosworth, Mr. Obama’s coordinator for North Korea in his first term, agreed. The rebalancing concept, Mr. Bosworth argued, “was ill conceived and bungled in its implementation.”

“What the announcement did was set up expectations that we would have a hard time fulfilling,” he said.

Within the administration, there is debate about how much bigger a presence in the region the United States can afford. When Katrina G. McFarland, the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, said this year that because of budget pressures, “the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly, it can’t happen,” she had to retract the statement.

Such comments have turned up the pressure on Mr. Obama. He will have to re-emphasize America’s presence without inflaming the Chinese. “The Chinese are certainly nervous about this trip: Is this just going to be the grand containment tour?” said Jeffrey A. Bader, Mr. Obama’s former top China adviser at the National Security Council. “It doesn’t have to be.”

But while the Asians fear the United States is missing in action, the Chinese make the case — partly for public consumption, perhaps to justify ever-larger defense budgets — that despite Mr. Obama’s protestations to the contrary, Washington is practicing an updated version of containment. Mr. Hagel got question after question about this when he held a forum with Chinese military officers recently.

Suspicions may be fueled by Mr. Obama’s visit to three treaty allies: Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. While Washington is obliged to defend all three against attack, the treaties say nothing about a clash over disputed territory, like the Scarborough Shoal, a fishing ground now occupied by Chinese vessels.

American officials have deliberately been vague about this question, and their formal position on territorial disputes is that the United States does not take sides. Filipinos would like Mr. Obama to clarify his intentions during his visit. But when Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, was asked in Manila in February whether America would help the Philippines in the South China Sea, he said: “Of course, we would help you. I don’t know what that help would be specifically.”

Given the range of nettlesome security issues that the United States faces in Asia, promoting trade with the region might be Mr. Obama’s best bet to build the credibility of his Asian pivot.

But the president’s signature initiative, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade pact among 12 nations, is falling prey to election-year pressures at home. Mr. Obama is unlikely to get fast-track authority to pass trade deals in this Congress, which is crucial to extracting concessions from Japan and other countries. The United States is seeking access to Japanese markets for rice, beef and pork.

“Crazy as it may sound that we should be so fixed on the beef prices or the reports on wheat and so forth, this actually has larger ramifications,” said Mireya Solís, a Japan expert at the Brookings Institution.

Floyd Whaley contributed reporting from Manila.

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